Elementary Portuguese Course - Started!!

Finally.... the course that I have signed up three times in the last nine months or so is finally offered by an institution here in Hong Kong. Amazing.

Portuguese is not as popular as other languages like Japanese, Korean, French or Spanish in Hong Kong, and it's for this reason that there are very few courses on Portuguese being offered here. Even some organisations wanted to offer such courses, they're bound to be cancelled because of lack of sufficient enrollment number.

I once considered going to Macau to study Portuguese, but then I quit this idea because it's simply too expensive to do it this way. Macau is close to Hong Kong, but the only way of transportation is only hydrofoil and the fare is not cheap. And it's too tiring traveling between the two places every week, even though if it would be only once a week.

I had the first lesson today.  It's Elementary Portuguese.  To my amazement, our teacher is a Brazilian.   Considering the tuition fee of the course (it's really good price, lol), that's much worth the money having some native Portuguese person as our teacher!  That's fantastic.

I have already had some basic knowledge of Portuguese prior to the course so hopefully I can manage it with ease.  Let's see how the course will go. I hope to be able to catch proper pronunciations of words & learn many new words/phrases/cultural elements from the teacher and also see if I can get to know from him some ways/opportunities of continuing learning the language with some native Portuguese speakers in Hong Kong. Ha!

I can't wait to have the second lesson! Haha.

My Book: 50 Ways to Improve Your Portuguese

It's been some time since I started learning Portuguese by myself. It's not easy to do it by myself (i.e. without any help of a teacher/tutor at class).

Needless to say, studying a language by oneself needs extra motivation of learning and determination, because without any push from a teacher/tutor, it's so easy to become lazy, lol. I have been trying to make a study schedule for myself, however, I have never been able to do so, lol. 

I have a number of textbooks and grammar exercise books with me. I have been reading the textbooks, listening to CDs and doing exercises.  The best thing would definitely be the chances to practise what I have learned in real life.  How much I wish I were living and working in Macau so at least there would be the learning environment.

How excited I was when I saw this book "50 Ways to Improve Your Portuguese" on the shelf in a bookstore yesterday.  I quickly snapped it, lol. This is a book written by one of the best known Portuguese language writers called Manuela Cook. I have been following her another book called "Complete Portuguese".  She writes in a very systematic way and I have learned quite a lot so far. 

Well... I'm planning to read one chapter (= one way) each day to improve my Portuguese.  So hopefully within 2 months (less than 60 days) I should have improved much of my Portuguese! Ha!




Image from: Amazon.co.uk